If your talking about brushed metal, thats not an easy effect to produce well without anisotropic shaders. However, you can fake it.

I believe there are some in the DarkTree shaders (search here to find out about a way to use those).

Internal to blender, you can stretch a cloud texture and get it to a certain point. However, in the CVS/New Release there is supposed to be a something that is decent, though not the best for producing the results on a flat surface. It was recently posted here. Or you can look at blender.org.

Thanks forte, I’ll take a look. The radial thing looks nice, but not quite what I was trying to do. I’m not sure if I mean brushed metal. The only way I can think to describe it is that it would look like thousands of extremely fine filings that sorta sparkle just a tad as you turn the object in front of a light source, but mostly looks a little dull. If that makes any sense…

I’ve tried messing with this every now and again. These techniques aren’t giving me the results I want. It looks like noise mixed with lines. I need more of an iron filings layered look.

This might not be a real-world technique, but another way I’m thinking to describe what I’m looking for - different colored and different sizes of slivers of metal sprayed on a surface. How can I get that look?